Pentagon clears 7 tech firms to deploy their AI on its classified networks

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon announced this morning that it has made agreements with seven leading tech firms to deploy their AIs on its classified networks.

The seven firms are Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, SpaceX, NVIDIA and Reflection, a newer startup backed by NVIDIA.

“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the announcement says.

The seven companies’ AIs are now approved for networks classified as Impact Level 6, which refers to networks handling secret data, and Impact Level 7, a semi-official term for the most highly classified systems. It’s the latest expansion of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to bring rapidly advancing commercial AI into the Defense Department, building on the standup of the secure but unclassified GenAI.mil platform in December.

“Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the announcement continues.

Notably absent from the list of firms is Anthropic, whose Claude AI was already in use on classified networks as part of Palantir’s Maven toolkit, but which the administration has tried to ban from government work, leading to a brace of lawsuits. Despite the ban, the secretive National Security Agency is reportedly using Anthropic’s new and not yet publicly available Mythos model, which is said to have significant cyber warfare capabilities.

The Pentagon announcement did not specify when the AI models would be available on classified networks or how much, if anything, the companies are being paid.